Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

Warning: link goes to National Review; story is by Kevin Williamson.

Witless Ape Rides Helicopter

Well, that sucked.

Memo to MAGA and all its myriad fellow-travelers: Maybe Death of a Salesman as presented by Leni Riefenstahl just wasn’t the show Americans were dying to tune into this season.

And, while we’re at it, maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.

Think on it, Cletus. I know this whole thing still sounds like your idea of a good time — how’s that working out for you?

Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Republicans controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress. They were in a historically strong position elsewhere as well, controlling both legislative chambers in 32 states. They pissed that away like they were midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song: In 2021, they control approximately squat. The House is run by Nancy Pelosi. The Senate is run, as a practical matter, by Kamala Harris. And Joe Biden won the presidency, notwithstanding whatever the nut-cutlet guest-hosting for Dennis Prager this week has to say about it.

Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term. Along with being the first president to be impeached twice and the first game-show host elected to the office, that’s Trump’s claim to the history books. Well, that and 400,000 dead Americans and the failed coup d’état business.

The title is a callback: In 2015, Williamson wrote a piece titled "Witless Ape Rides Escalator."

Does having possible defendants having been pardoned limit how investigations can go or would it remove the efficacy of the pardons.
Just wondering if there is a protocol about how close one can get to a person with a pardon i criminal investigation or anything.
Hoping that it is just something taht can be overlooked if the evidence points squarely at an individual but could see an establihment institution wanting to tread carefully.

do I recall seeing that if you've been pardoned you can't plead the fifth?

yeah have heard that several times over the last few weeks

congrats on the pardon steve

Re: that Williamson piece— once again, and sorry to repeat myself, but it is simply *dangerous* to relegate QAnon, Trumpers, and etc. to the realm of "Cletus"-esque hillbillies, because for the most part, they're not.

yep, they are rich white suburbans

did having them be possibly marginalised disguise how dangerous they could appear and if so was there any benefit in that. Other tahn to disguise how they were the them ion an us and them with working class GOP supporters.
LIke was teh Cletus/hillbilly/great unwashed thing purely external projection or was it partially disguise

Kevin Williamson has a history of sneering at the poor. He also wrote this paragraph:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

But table is OTM that his characterization of the Capitol Rioters is off-base.

This Adam Serwer piece is good:

They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys.

The mob that breached the Capitol last week at President Donald Trump’s exhortation, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was full of what you might call “respectable people.” They left dozens of Capitol Police officers injured, screamed “Hang Mike Pence!,” threatened to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and set up a gallows outside the building. Some were extremists using the crowd as cover, but as federal authorities issue indictments, a striking number of those they name appear to be regular Americans.

And there’s nothing surprising about that. Although any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially, no one should be shocked to see the middle classes so well represented among the mob.

The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.

God, that first Williamson 'graph you quoted is execrable.

That Kevin Williamson piece is terrible, like all his work, and it wasn’t better the second time it was posted here.

yeah, it's a lot of privileged people cosplaying an underground, street level role. which they're ill-suited for mentally but compensate for with heavy artillery and weaponry.

I don't know that the military component of the insurrection neatly Venn diagrams with QAnon - a lot of them are just folk with hard-right wing beliefs that tend to lack critical thinking skills and want to believe their guy was cheated because, well, he said so.

It’s fun to scapegoat the poor for the crimes of extremists and millionaires. Feels good like OxyContin.

I’m all for moving the qanon cesspool stuff to another thread but table otm that sneering at cleetuses doesn’t work (well, it probably works for Kevin Williamson, I’m sure he did very well out of the never trump grift).

fuckin' christ. is he a libertarian by chance? (Williamson)

a lot of privileged people cosplaying an underground, street level role

They're here to embody the voice of the voiceless, don't u see?

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

I’m sure he also blames mass incarceration and generational poverty on the “culture” of urban black communities. Same attitude, different target: he is finding a group of underprivileged people to blame for the failures of the Republican party.

really the face of the QAnon, even though they weren't really QAnon, are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, affluent asshole lawyers holding hand cannons they weren't even using properly and waving them in the faces of minorities who weren't threatening them

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

― zydecovid (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, January 21, 2021 11:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

went back to Melmac

The real face of QAnon is Donald Trump’s face.

Donald Trump's ass more like

Highlights asks:

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

That Williamson piece is a cogent reminder that, while never-Trumpers are able to see what a piece of shit he is, they only hate him because they're stumping for a different but equally shitty piece of shit.

NRO keeps Williamson around because he better express their contempt for the poor who will never ride on the NRO cruise.

*expresses

Has anyone checked on dilbert guy

You know, I was reading the Sunday paper a week or so ago and I was struck by the fact that Dilbert guy just goes on putting up normal "isn't office life amusing" comics through it all, which, I guess, why not? The real estate agents who stay up all night feverishly parsing Q probably go on selling houses every day in a normal way.

As for the class status of the Capitol insurrectionists; it seems to me that this particular strain of greivance politics cuts across class lines, and in the crowd were well-heeled suburbanites and working-class people Kevin Williamson would consider hopeless yokels, and that neither of these groups represented a "well in any big crowd of course there are a few" afterthought, they were both really there!

xpost There's cognitive dissonance and then there's maintaining a comfortable upper-to-middle class existence while actively attempting to destroy the facets of society that allow you to maintain that particular existence. It's a state of mind that I'm completely incapable of wrapping my head around.

Re: that Williamson piece— once again, and sorry to repeat myself, but it is simply *dangerous* to relegate QAnon, Trumpers, and etc. to the realm of "Cletus"-esque hillbillies, because for the most part, they're not.

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, January 21, 2021 10:45 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yep, they are rich white suburbans

― Überschadenfreude (sleeve), Thursday, January 21, 2021 10:47 AM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Why can't they be rich white hillbillies? You can take the hillbilly out of the hill, etc.

Existential boredom is a helluva drug.

xp

the entire concept of hillbillies is not helpful in any way

Apologies, and certainly agree that they were not rural working class whites.

JETHRO IS Q!

Barndomaniacs

i think the takeaway is that militant white supremacy is appealing to just about any white (and also not technically white!) person you can imagine across the class spectrum. as far as kevin williamson goes, rich or "respectable" conservative culture has to find a balance between keeping a toe in the white supremacy club and bashing poor people when it suits them. a game of strategic whack-a-mole. nro is the worst and i really wish people would stop talking about them or linking to them as if they should be responded to in any way.

but part of it is the "they have money and advanced degrees" pass that gets you into any conversation in america no matter how reprehensible your opinions.

replace "advanced" with "ivy league"

The Muslim ban is no more and I am grateful. Most people who haven’t been personally impacted might not get the significance and think of it as only “symbolic” but for us it’s significant. https://t.co/OXQGNnmCkq

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 21, 2021

Rep. Greene has not introduced her promised Articles of Impeachment yet. According to a GOP source in her district, Greene "thought it would be a lot easier than it is." https://t.co/k0Bk8cjpGn

— Charles Bethea (@charlesbethea) January 21, 2021

ahahahahaha

"I thought our desks had Impeach buttons"

now there's the news I want

any new executive orders?

These Qongresspeople are going to get chewed to pieces trying to galaxy brain their way through procedural minutiae.

not surprising, he's just gonna spend years whining about everyone being unfair to Trump

No one is above the law, but if Trump is targeted for destruction for reasons that look like revenge rather than justice, I'll be taking that VERY personally. I don't think I am alone in that opinion. Actions have consequences.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 21, 2021

yes, Scott, everything is about you and your shitty comic

Such a tedious child of a man.

"Actions have consequences"

Yes, ransacking the Capitol has consequences.

Who does Marjorie mean by "The Big Guy"? Boss Hogg? George "The Animal" Steele?

Ric Flair